Are we naturally lazy?
On the human condition and the fake quest to be absolutely shitty to one another
I don’t actually intend to take on the subject of this post. Are we naturally lazy is such a lazy question; an answer to the question all at once. Either yes, we are natually lazy and need to be encouraged by stuff like profits into doing things like working or eating, or no, we are not, and we would make ourselves dinner even if we weren’t going to die if we stopped eating.
But this question: what is our natural state? has dominated my Twitter feed for a few days now. On Friday, Sylvain Charlebois, Canada’s grocery industry number one fan, tweeted this
Fine. I agree with him that anyone that is using the term greedflation should probably step out of the conversation because it’s a grating term.
But — the answer to this question is, I think, obvious. None. There should be no profits in our food chain. I tweeted that and was promptly ratioed
Aside from the fact that my tweet was much more popular than his, and of course this isn’t surprising, the chorus of negative replies all said some variation of the same thing: no profits? No innovation. No food industry.
Which brings me around to the title of this piece: are we naturally lazy? If we didn’t have greed to drive us, would we simply lay around until death found us?
There are certainly forces that want us to think this. Scarcity is a driver of human behaviour and the more we believe that there is scarcity, the more we might find ourselves hording that which is scarce. Recall the great run on toilet paper at the start of the pandemic. But scarcity under capitalism is expertly controlled. There is scarcity but there is also a lot, a lot, a lot of excess. The sphincter that controls plenty does so with an eye to gouging us for as much money it can.
Let’s nevermind the fact that the lion’s share of what passes for innovation today originated within public institutions, only to find its way to market in a parasitical relationship between the commercializers and the commercialized. This doesn’t matter. But to be allowed to see the natural generosity of people — scarcity plays a role here too.
If we are allowed to see too much generosity, we might believe that, actually, humans are naturally generous. This is why it is “news” when there is a disaster that people become generous. Old timey people on camera saying, “well, that’s just how folks are around here. We aren’t like other places. We help one another when times are tough” … as if that isn’t true for any community, in any circumstances, located anywhere on the planet.
Throttling the amount of generosity we are allowed to see, whether done by journalists or politicians or businesses, creates the myth that generosity is an aberation. The norm is selfishness — nevermind that no religion on the planet extols the virtues of selfishness — the scarcity of generosity we’re allowed to see changes our perception of how generous this world really is. Or even more important, how generous this world can be.
I have a neighbour who is extremely generous with me. I’ve tried to be with him too, even when it meant losing a few heads of exploding tiger lillies from my small garden. I passed him on the sidewalk last week late at night and wished him a good carnival (this is how we talk in Québec — bonne carnaval!) He stopped, reached into a white plastic bag, and handed me a ceinture fléchée — the iconic carnival scarf that Québecers wear around their wastes in February (bonus marks if it’s around a fur coat).
These things are not cheap and he isn’t a wealty man. He had no reason to give this to me (for the kids) but he did. And it sent the kids over the moon. It was a mundane gesture in a world that tells me that no one in their right mind would do this, lest I was dying or had just had my house burn to the ground or hadn’t eaten in a week or had just lost seven of my toes to wild turkeys.
But that isn’t how people are. People are good. It’s everything that’s been put around us that forces us to be less than good. And the work of someone who cares about justice is to fight against these forces that make us decide to do selfish things.
Regardless of if some people absorb the identity of being a profit-chasing greed monster, it doesn’t change that we have evolved over 150,000 to become good people who, under good conditions, do good unto others.
I totally agree with you. If one does any rudimentary reading on how Indigenous peoples governed their territories before colonization came along, we know that working together in ways that were mutually beneficial was the principle everyone understood and strove to maintain. Acts of aggression were relatively rare and for the most part, building and maintaining peace was paramount. White supremacy in all its manifestations changed all that.